7 Ways to View Cached Webpages in Chrome and Google

A webpage doesn’t stay accessible forever. But fortunately, Google regularly takes snapshots of webpages that we can view later. Cached pages are essentially backups that are stored in Google’s servers. Practically search results come with cached link and clicking on it allows you to view cached copy of a webpage, instead of the current live version.

Similar to Google, there is also an Internet Archive having billion of cached webpages. Also web browsers like Chrome stores the local cache of the site’s you visit. In this article let us discuss different ways to view cached page when it is not accessible. Remember the cached copy from Internet (Google and Internet Archive) is the latest snapshot while from Chrome browser is the version when you visited the page last time.

1. View Cache from Google Search Results Page

Choose the result entry that you want and click the downward facing arrowhead at the end of URL or breadcrumb.

Click on “Cached” from the context menu.

View Cached Page from Google Search

When a cached page is displayed, the header section shows the data and time of the cache and a reminder that the current page could have changed in the meantime. You should also know that Google might omit the cached link if the owners have asked Google to not cache their websites and remove the existing cached version. Because the cached webpage is simplified for faster access, you will get missing backgrounds and broken images. To remove all graphics, you can choose to read the plain text version by clicking on the “Text-only version” link. However, in some cases, this will actually make the webpage more difficult to read, because the layout has been distorted. You can always click the Back button of your web browser or click “Full version” link to get back to the previous version.

Open Cached Page from Google Search

2. View Cache from Chrome Address Bar

It’s another handy method to view the cached version of a webpage. Follow these steps:

Open Chrome web browser.

Type “cache:” in the address bar of the browser, followed by the target URL.

As an example, if you are looking for the cached version of www.wikipedia.org, then you need to type in “cache:www.wikipedia.org”.

The result will look similar to the cached version you see from Google Search.

View Cached Page from Chrome Address

3. View Cache Using Wayback Machine

The other easy way to view cached pages is by using the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is a digital library that crawls and indexes all the webpages on the Internet. These pages are stored as snapshots in archives based on the calendar. It is known as Wayback machine and contains 310 billion of archived pages from the past.

You can access information on the currently missing webpage, if it was accessible in the past. Open Chrome and go to Internet Archive site, type in the target URL in the search box field and press enter.

Wayback Machine or Internet Archive

A calendar interface will be displayed and you can choose cached version for a specific date. You should be aware that the information can be outdated if the cached version is very old.

View Cached or Archived Pages from Internet Archive

Actually you can use any of browsers for viewing Internet archive of webpages.

4. View Cache Using Chrome Extension

You can use Chrome extension to view the cached versions of a page from Wayback Machine or Google Cache. Open your Chrome browser and go to the Chrome Web Store. Look for “Web Cache Viewer” extension and install it on your browser.

Chrome Web Cache Viewer Extension

Generally you can right click on any link on a webpage on Chrome and choose “Web Cache Viewer” option. You can choose to view the cached page from either Wayback Machine or Google archive.

View Cached Page with Chrome Extension

This extension is very useful to get the archived pages when 404 not found error is shown. If the link is not shown on any webpage then paste the complete URL in a Notepad or TextEdit file. Save the file with .html extension and open using Chrome browser.

5. View Chrome Cache Using Third Party Software

There are software solutions that allow you directly view the cached version of a webpage from Chrome browser. This is an indirect way of accessing cache and you don’t even need to have Internet connection. However, you must have already visited the website in the past.

ChromeCacheView is one of the third party solutions available for Windows to view cache from Google Chrome. The software locates and reads the cache folder of Chrome web browser. This method is useful if Google has somehow removed the cached version of the webpage and the live version of the webpage is inaccessible as well. Note that if you have cleared the web browser cache recently, the cached webpage already disappeared forever.

Download the executable file and open from any folder. This will show all cached files from Chrome’s cache. You can export the cached files to HTML report and open on the browser using the URLs.

View Cached File from Chrome Cache

Chrome cache is stored under “C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache” in Windows 10. But these files will have no extension and you may not be view the content easily.

6. Use Show Save Copy Button in Chrome

First turn off your Internet connection, so that the cache on Chrome is not over written. Now go to the URL “chrome://flags/#show-saved-copy” and choose “Enable: Primary” option. You should relaunch the browser for the changes to take effect.

Enable Chrome Flag for Show Saved Copy

This flag will enable to view the saved copy of the website when the connection is not available as mentioned in the definition.

When a page fails to load, if a stale copy of the page exists in the browser cache, a button will be presented to allow the user to load that stale copy. The primary enabling choice puts the button in the most salient position on the error page; the secondary enabling choice puts it secondary to the reload button. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android.

Once the flag is enabled, go to the webpage URL you want to view the cache. Chrome will show the error “err_internet_disconnected” along with a “Show saved copy” button. Click on the button to view the cached copy from Chrome.

Viewing Saved Copy of Webpage in Chrome

7. View Cached Copy of a Webpage from Chrome Hex Dump

As Chrome browser also stores the cached copy of sites you visit, if the live page is not accessible, you can try retrieving the page from your Chrome browser’s cache. Go to the URL, “chrome://view-http-cache/” or “chrome://cache/”. This page will show all the cached pages on your Chrome browser. Search for the URL you want to view and click on it. It will open the page like below:

View Chrome Cache Hex Dump

If you could not find the URL, try opening using the shortcut “chrome://view-http-cache/FULL-URL-HERE”. Ensure to replace the “FULL-URL-HERE” text with the complete URL you want to view (with https/http and www).

Chrome stores the cache as hexadecimal code dump, so it is not possible to view the page as it shows from live server. You can read the article in stack overflow and check any of the scripts mentioned can be used for your purpose.

What if You Can’t View the Cached Version?

In some situations, you can’t find a cached version of the website. This happens when the administrator modifies robots.txt file to prevent the caching process. People may do this if they don’t want the content retained elsewhere. There’s actually a huge dark territory of the web that search engine crawlers can’t access, such as information stored behind a login-based system, private discussion forums, paid online newspaper and others.

You may confirm this by searching for the content=”noarchive” entry in the webpage’s source code. If the robots.txt file prevents the crawlers from indexing the website, you shouldn’t expect to see any cached content in Google’s search result or from Wayback Machine. Also you can use Google cache checker tool to verify whether Google has the cached copy of the page and the date of cache.

But you should be able to get the cache from local Chrome browser’s cache.

Conclusion

If you actively seek information on the web, Google Cache is a useful feature. Most of the time, you can get a copy version of the website that’s indexed by the crawler. Even if you rarely use it on a daily basis, there should be a time when you will benefit from it. This is especially true if the webpage becomes inaccessible due to various reasons. In other situations, the webpage is still accessible, but the administrator has removed a piece of crucial information.

If online cache is not accessible for any reasons like the site owner restrict from crawlers, you should try to get the cached copy of a webpage from local Chrome browser’s cache.

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2 Comments

Leave your reply.

I am facing some cache problem on the Google search engine. When I write cache query on Google then it showing 404 error. Can you tell me what the exact problem behind this? I already checked Robots.txt and Website load time, both are normal.

Why exactly does Chrome store cached pages…and since they’re being stored anyway, why can’t we define easily when to display a cached page? For example, this vital need:

How to always get Chrome to show the locally cached page when you hit the Back button?

When viewing news sites, the dynamic content shows links to other news items. At times I catch a quick glimpse of the title of a link I want to visit, but hitting the back button reloads the page…the link has then been replaced by other dynamic content, and so lost. If Chrome displayed the cached content instead of reloading the page, I can see again and visit the desired link…

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